Reflections on the state of the world which proceed with the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other

Friday, May 29, 2015

Putting An End to Childish Ways

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an end to childish ways. - I Corinthians 13:11

Time for a Reality Check

This past week Ireland became the first nation-state to
end discrimination against same-sex couples seeking to be legally married by
means of a ballot initiative. The vote in this strongly Roman Catholic nation
with a long history of conservative moralism was not really that close – 61% of
the voters approved the measure and pollsters estimate that up to a quarter of
Irish priests voted in favor of marriage equality.

The reactions to this vote within Roman Catholicism have
been fascinating to watch. Of course, polls have revealed that same sex
marriage has been favored by majorities of Catholic faithful worldwide for the
past decade even as its leadership has stridently opposed the same. Some
priests and bishops have gone so far as to bar gay parishioners and the elected
officials who support them from receiving the eucharist, a shameful use of the
sacraments as a weapon in the culture wars. (Let those with ears hear,
Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando!)

The local archbishop onsite in Dublin was pretty clear
about the implications of the vote for the Irish church calling it “a wake-up
call for the Catholic church. This is a social revolution…The church has a huge
task in front of it get its message across to young people ... The church needs
to do a reality check.”

The Irish church is coming to grips with the reality that
it has lost its dominant grip as moral arbiter of Irish society, much of it due
to its own mishandling of the explosive revelations regarding physical and
sexual abuse of children by Irish priests and nuns in its schools and
orphanages. Such a debacle signals not only the need for remorse and
repentance, it also suggests that perhaps the moralistic system that gave rise
to such behaviors itself demands critical reflection and reconsideration.

One would never have known that such reflection, much
less repentance, was even a possibility from the statement by the number two
spokesperson from the Vatican. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary
of state, said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday night. “The church must take
account of this reality, but in the sense that it must strengthen its
commitment to evangelisation. I think that you cannot just talk of a defeat for
Christian principles, but of a defeat for humanity.”

There is no small amount of arrogance in presuming that a
given construction of sexuality which has been protected from any kind of
critical reexamination even in the face of much evidence that its premises were
faulty somehow defines what it means to be human. There is also no small amount of arrogance in
refusing to even consider the possibility that a given understanding of the
mystery of what it means to be human could be wrong, that there is no place for
critical reflection on one’s understanding. There is a difference between
resolutely holding one’s position and simply stonewalling.

The cardinal also suggests that the only possible
solution is to double down on selling this dubious theology to a public increasingly
disinterested in even hearing about it. It’s an interesting example of how
evangelizing is more often used to relieve the cognitive dissonance of the
evangelizer purveying patently unbelievable understandings than anything
remotely related to the interests of those evangelized. It’s much easier to
hold onto unbelievable ideas if you have a lot of company in that
confabulation.

It’s also particularly interesting to note the language
the cardinal used here: “a defeat for humanity.” If that sounds familiar, it
should. Pope Francis I uses that phrase upon occasion. But the cardinal seems
to have taken enormous license with its usage. When Francis talks about “a
defeat for humanity,” he is talking about war, not the sour grapes of the loser
in a culture war skirmish. Indeed, Francis’ response to questions about the
presence of gay people within the church’s hierarchy was decidedly
latitudinarian: “Who am I to judge?”

Maybe it’s time for Frankie to call his Cardinal in for
tea.

“A Real and Present Danger?”

Of course, the cardinal is hardly the only figure willing
to make sweeping statements about the lifting of anti-gay barriers in the name
of religion. This week Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), speaking to the Christian
Broadcasting Network, said that America stood on “the water’s edge of the
argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech…if
you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater…”

Rubiowent on to
paint a slippery slope in which “the next step is to argue that the teachings
of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech.
And that's a real and present danger."

It’s no accident that Rubio, an attorney admitted to
practice in Florida, would allude to a principle from Supreme Court caselaw here.
Over the years the Court has tried to define what constitutes a “clear and
present danger” when deciding whether to curtail someone’s First Amendment
rights. While the prohibition on yelling fire in a crowded theater was Justice Oliver
Wendell Holme’s quick and dirty version, the Court has historically wrestled
with whether the public advocacy of communism and socialism somehow pose a “clear
and present danger” to American national interests sufficient to prevent
speakers and publishers from presenting those ideas to the public.

There’s no small amount of irony in a conservative
Republican who has one foot in the evangelical Protestant world with the other
in his native Roman Catholic tradition employing a metaphor designed to test
the free expression rights of communists, the ideologues who drove his own
family from their native Cuba four decades ago. But Rubio does draw a bead on
two important issues in this conflict. The first is the aversion that holders of
this common social prejudice have to being called on their prejudice. The
second is the willful conflation of that prejudice with foundational
understandings of the Christian religion.

While Rubio’s use of “haters” is the quip du jour of the chattering
classes on the right, it is ultimately undescriptive of the matter at hand and
childish. It’s perfectly possible to
call someone on their prejudices and not hate them. As Sister Helen Prejean,
the chaplain to death row inmates and author of Dead Man Walking is prone to say, “people are more than the worst
thing they have ever done in their lives.” How many of us have racist and
sexist relatives we love despite their misanthropic views?

However, Rubio’s assertion that those who oppose same-sex
marriage are frequently seen as homophobic is no doubt true. That deserves more
critical scrutiny.

The Difficulty of Diagnosing the Problem

Part of the problem with the use of homophobia is that it
is cast in a psychological language that suggests fear - phobia. People who are acrophobic
fear heights, those who are claustrophobic fear closed in places and those who
suffer from ophidiophobia can’t be near a snake.

While fear is not a particularly helpful way of
understanding unbidden social prejudices except perhaps in their more
pathological expressions, there is another aspect of this description that does
speak to the reality observable in both the comments by the Cardinal as well as
those by the junior senator from Florida. Phobias are irrational by nature. Most folks suffering from acrophobia have
very little real danger of ever falling from a high place as merely being
present there can reduce them to sweats and trembling. When asked they cannot
explain it. At a very basic level that makes their reaction even more powerful
in that they are unable to rationally get at its causes.

In a similar vein, homophobia is an irrational response
to homosexual behaviors. Homosexual behaviors appear throughout the animal
kingdom and have been documented throughout human history, recognizing that it
is quite possible to engage in such behaviors in a given context and not experience
oneself as constitutionally inclined to do so on a consistent basis (e.g.,
prison sex). While it is almost always the minority report on human sexuality,
it is a constant in human behavior.

Another problematic aspect in talking about homophobia is
that it tends to be reductionist. No
one sums up an acrophobic individual by their aversion to heights. We don’t
talk about the acrophobic “community” nor of “acrophobes” who avoid being
exposed to heights spoken of as advancing a particular “agenda.”

Ironically, the reductionism in talking about homophobia (Just a homophobe…) is part and parcel of
a larger reductionism employed by an aspect of a heterosexism which has
historically seen the experience of the heterosexual
majority to be “normal” and those which deviated from that pattern as
“deviant.” How many persons who experience themselves as LBGTQ have felt their
blood curdle when described in the clinical terms of being “a homosexual?”

Of course, from a statistical perspective, heterosexual
inclinations and behaviors are “normal” in the empirically dominant sense of
that word. As Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch of the Sisters of Perpetual
Indulgence once put it on National Coming Out Day on the steps of Sproul Hall
at UC Berkeley, “Instead of calling heterosexuality normal, call it what it
really is: common.”

It is the moralizing of that statistical prevalence that
lies at the root of the cultural phenomenon called homophobia. The more benign
version is called heterosexism, the
presumption that everyone either is heterosexual in orientation or ought to be
and must either be made into the majority’s likeness or constrained if they
prove unwilling. The malignant version is that those who don’t fit the
majority’s experience are somehow less than fully human and not entitled to
respect of their human dignity. This is homophobia.

Confusing a Common Social Prejudice with Religion

At the bottom line, what we are talking about here is a
common social prejudice. How common? Like heterosexual and homosexual behaviors,
heterosexism and homophobia can both be found in most ancient cultures. The
same dynamics that prompt the majority in a culture to see their experience as
normative for everyone and to demonize the minority experience are observable
in all historical cultures and until only very recently dominated our own
culture. That phenomenon is called a prejudice. Not surprisingly such
prejudices are inevitably reflected in cultural artifacts such as the Hebrew
Scriptures.

That ancient peoples held the same common social
prejudices as modern people is not difficult to understand. We are in many ways
products of our forebears. But the notion that modern peoples must uncritically
default to the prejudicial understandings of our forebears is an exercise in
intellectual laziness. And when the critical appropriation of ancient religious
thought is done on a selective basis (slavery is not OK, but heterosexism is
divinely mandated) we both reveal our prejudices and lapse into disingenuity
and deceit.

More importantly, because no socially constructed belief
system ever stands on its own two feet, its purveyors will always feel the need
to legitimate their tenets in one of three manners, according to sociologist
Max Weber. One will either resort to tradition (it’s always been that way) or to
the authority of natural arguments (this is the nature of things) or to supernatural
arguments (the gods will it). The problem arises, as Weber noted, when critical
(as opposed to instrumental) reason, the modern method for legitimation of
social constructions, is brought to bear.

The fact that a common social prejudice has been held for
a very long time does not make it any less a prejudice. The argument that
heterosexual behavior complete with its potential for procreation is the
dominant expression in all sexed life forms does not exhaust the argument from
nature; a minority expression of homosexual behaviors appear in all living
beings.

As for whether the gods hold our prejudices, that largely
depends upon how they are constructed. Ann Lamott’s now famous saying that “You can safely assume you've created God in
your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”
reflects that construction process and the very subtle way that our own
prejudices become legitimated when they are disowned and placed in the mind of
G-d.

But true religions are designed to allow its adherents to
both transcend the world in which we live as well as to transform it. This can
never be accomplished by simply defaulting to the common prejudices of any
given culture. It is precisely such understandings that religions like
Christianity call its members to transcend.

As the Good Samaritan parable observes, it was impossible
to live into the duty to love one’s neighbor and pass him by as he lay dying
from an assault by robbers because one’s religious strictures prohibited the
same. Similarly, it is impossible to love one’s LBGTQ neighbor as oneself and
hold to self-serving constructions that denigrate and discriminate against them
because their sexual inclinations differ from the majority.

So what can one take away from this long, rambling post?

The Cardinal is wrong. Neither heterosexism
nor homophobia define humanity. Ending social practices which enforce common
social prejudices does not “defeat humanity,” it helps us transcend our lowest
common denominators.

The Senator is wrong. Neither heterosexism
nor homophobia are fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. They are cultural
accidents in which the experience of a self-serving majority has been moralized
and placed into the mind of G-d. Ending discrimination based in social prejudices
does not present a “real and present danger” to Christianity, it provides it an
opportunity for it to live into its highest ideals.

Finally, the willful conflation of a common
social prejudice with either the well-being of humanity or the fundamental
tenets of the world’s largest religion does not serve either of these interests.
It simply harms the credibility of those who make such untenable claims.

The Christian faith and the common social prejudice that
expresses itself as heterosexism on a good day and homophobia on most days
should never be confused with one
another. They are not the same thing. And it does harm to that faith to
deliberately use them interchangeably.

If the
Christian tradition is to survive, it will need to transcend this shameful page
of its own history to do so. It is time to put an end to childish ways. That process
begins with the willingness to engage in a patently Christian practice: Repentance.

About Me

I am a fifth generation Floridian, a fourth generation educator, third generation college educator. My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright so I guess it was fate that I would end up a teacher. I am a recovering lawyer who still holds an inactive license with the Florida Bar (I stopped practice in 1990) and an ordained Episcopal priest. My spirituality is that of an inner world (nature) mystic. I am Franciscan to my very core, a professed member of 26 years in the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF). Andy , my gentle souled, soft-spoken partner of 44 years became my legal husband in 2010 on the steps of the US Supreme Court. He is G-d's greatest gift to my life. I live within two hours of my nuclear family members. Historically I have been a yellow dawg Democrat though my politics are decidedly Green. I hold a Ph.D. in Religion, Law and Society from FSU, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, member seminary of the GTU in Berkeley, CA, and a J.D. and a B.A. in History and Secondary Ed from the University of Florida. I complete a two year program at Richard Rohr’s Living School for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM August 2017.